Development of a Tobacco Price Monitoring System

Audience: Tobacco control advocates, researchers, and decision-makers

Key Points: Pricing and price-promotional activities are major features of tobacco industry marketing. Tobacco companies manipulate prices and use price promotions to reach selected consumers in targeted geographies, to pursue specific business strategies, and to reduce the impact of tobacco excise tax increases. These actions have direct effects on both non-tobacco users and tobacco users. Unfortunately, there is currently no consistent, reliable, and comprehensive source for tobacco price monitoring in the U.S. This presentation will review three methods of collecting tobacco price data: commercially available retail scanner records; in-store observations; and population surveys. In addition to estimated costs, protocols for each method will be described, including sampling, measures, reliability, and geographic scope. Since no single approach is sufficient to address all tobacco price monitoring needs at the national, state and local levels, a multi-method tobacco price monitoring system will also be described.

Educational Experience: The presented information can be used to guide the development and implementation of price monitoring approaches. Effective monitoring of tobacco price can serve as an important tool to inform tobacco control programmatic and policy initiatives. 

Benefits: The absence of any systematic, ongoing assessment of tobacco price and price-promotional activities limits tobacco control programs’ ability to monitor the tobacco industry's price manipulation efforts and to mount effective programmatic and policy countermeasures. This presentation describes a multi-method tobacco price monitoring system that could provide the tobacco control community with maximally valid and reliable tobacco price data at the lowest possible cost.